In 2007 I wrote and presented a conceptual paper to an
international studies group in Portugal. The subject matter was,
generally, the use of Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (ECN) to
manage humanity. That paper would eventually finds its way, remarkably,
into Rebecca Costa’s seminal The Watchman’s Rattle.I said back in 2007 that America’s ongoing obsession with
national security and the enormous funding necessary to soothe a
national psyche of fear and war was a key driver for enhancing security
thereby eliminating the uncertainty of daily living. I suggested that
ECN could generate predictive and diagnostic biotechnologies to reduce
tension. Such a development could eliminate much uncertainty and
concomitant drama in human affairs by providing leaders with assets to
manage the complexities in brain-behavior relationships. To get there
though, reliable data on human beings, as they function as
interconnected consumers, warfighters, enemies, refugees, diplomats,
criminals, and citizens of their respective nations would need to be
collected and assessed.I went on to say that a comprehensive knowledge base of planetary
ecosystems and how humans interface with those ecosystems would have to
be constructed and meshed with the findings of brain-behavior
functions. The dissection of the individual and global organism may lead
to unprecedented forecasting capability with the ultimate outcome the
creation of biomachine systems that suggest procedures and diagnostics
with which to anticipate and/or minimize a wide range of human problems.
Biomachine tools might become available that could suggest courses of
action such as military intervention, diplomacy, containment, stability
and consequence management operations, economic aid, covert operations,
etc. I also briefly mentioned that one of the dangers in such a pursuit
would likely be the development of neuroweaponry.In just under ten years, the topics alluded to in my 2007 paper
have taken the form of four converging and accelerating movements that
seem likely to usher in drastic change in the human condition: The digitization of human behavior; cracking open the brain through neuroscience; the engineering and manipulation of human and non-human genomes;
and the proliferation of the Internet of Things, which is code for the
sensorization of the human/non-human, home, work, school, automobile,
street, global commons, etc.Is it any surprise that the Anthropocene is upon us?What Happens Next?Shoshana Zuboff, in the article, The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism,
thinks that humanity will become mentally displaced, perhaps
disembodied, as behavior becomes totally predictable and free will
vanishes.

The significance of behavioral surplus was quickly
camouflaged, both at Google and eventually throughout the Internet
industry, with labels like “digital exhaust,” “digital
breadcrumbs,”…These euphemisms for behavioral surplus operate as
ideological filters, in exactly the same way that the earliest maps of
the North American continent labeled whole regions with terms like
“heathens,” “infidels,” “idolaters,” “primitives,” “vassals,” or
“rebels.” On the strength of those labels, native peoples, their places
and claims, were erased from the invaders’ moral and legal equations,
legitimating their acts of taking and breaking in the name of Church and
Monarchy. We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to
self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own behavior. They
are erased in an astonishing and audacious act of dispossession by
surveillance that claims its right to ignore every boundary in its
thirst for knowledge of and influence over the most detailed nuances of
our behavior. For those who wondered about the logical completion of
the global processes of commodification, the answer is that they
complete themselves in the dispossession of our intimate quotidian
reality, now reborn as behavior to be monitored and modified, bought and
sold.

Radar LoveSocial Radar has been a goal of the government and business for some
time. Its applications are legion: Predictive behavioral algorithms to
ensure consumers are directed to the right product to ensure steady
profits; underlying predictive mathematical models that allow the
military commander a quantitative, geospatial view of open or urban
terrain with humans moving predictably like aircraft on an air traffic
controller’s screen; and the creation of a predictive reality in which
the masses believe they are “free”, but are, unknown to them, being
behaviorally shaped for the larger system. These notions can be found in
military doctrine and a host of academic and marketing organizations.
It’s all there out in the open if anyone cares to look.Consider The MITRE Corporation’s development of Social Radar. In Social Radar for Smart Power, Mark Maybury writes:

“Conventional radar requires signatures for different
kinds of objects and events: it needs to be tuned to different
environmental conditions to provide accurate and reliable information.
Analogously, a social radar needs signatures, calibration, and
correlation to sense, if not forecast, a broad spectrum of phenomena
(e.g., political, economic, social, environmental, health) and
potentially forecast changing trends in population perceptions and
behaviors. For example, radar or sonar enable some degree of
forecasting by tracking spatial and temporal patterns (e.g. they track
and display how military objects or weather phenomena move in what
clusters, in which direction(s) and at what speed.) A user can thus
project where and when objects will be in the future. Similarly, a
social radar should enable us to forecast who will cluster with whom in a
network, where, and when in what kinds of relationships…Public Opinion
Polling by Proxy (POP/P) [is] an exploration of the ability of social
media (e.g., Twitter) to serve as a proxy for traditional opinion
polling methods to overcome their latency, expense, and invasiveness.”

If We Kick the Ant Hill, Where will the Ants Go?The US national security community’s dream is to have a Social
Radar–like the one described above by Maybury—that would allow military
commanders to lord over other countries. The Pentagon’s Sociocultural
Behavior Research and Engineering in a Department of Defense Context
contains this statement:

“Mastery would mean that U.S. forces would have the data
on indigenous populations and the training they need to move easily in
those populations; could see the parameters of culture and society and
integrate those with conventional mapping of the physical terrain; could
detect often complex and dynamic networks, where adversaries and
civilian populations are intermingled; and would possess non-kinetic
tools as well as the ability to anticipate both the near-term and
long-term impacts of applying those tools.”

It’s easy to pick on the Pentagon on these matters, of course. But
the insidious reality is that for profit, commercial enterprises with
global reach—and the many lobbyists and non-profits who work on their
behalf to distort regulatory regimes designed to oversee their
activities—must modify human behavior in order to control/corner global
markets, turn a profit and survive. These are the new colonialists who
now brandish the US military as a tool for their own ends.If Zuboff is correct, then Google–and corporations colluding with
them or like them—are engaging in a type of intellectual property theft
from unwitting customers. The thoughts, feelings, the sense of
individual uniqueness of a human being (or his/her genetic structure)
ultimately ends up getting copyrighted, trademarked or patented by
corporations. It is the Internet of Sensors, Neuroscience, Genetic
Engineering and the Digitization of Earth in the techno-dictatorial
hands of corporate boardrooms and financiers that may well prove to be
apocalyptic for all life on Earth.Unfortunately the leadership of the dangerously privatized US
military has become an extension of this techno-corporate collective and
the governing civilians the collective owns. Indeed, so much so that US
military leadership, while on “active duty”, emulates its mentors in
the corporate world because (a.) rampant internal privatization has
distorted the US military; and (b.) the private sector is where US
military leaders long to be when it’s retirement time. It’s all about
networking for the big payday in the private sector, or developing
networking diagrams to see who the bad guys affiliate with in some
remote corner of the African continent.So it is no surprise that

“…the worldview that governs the U.S military’s
approach…is one where populations are de-coded as networks. To see like
the twenty-first century US military is to see a world of networks. This
world of networks is a secular cosmological vision derivative from the
human-machine assemblages where US military personnel and institutions
are imbricated. These human-machine assemblages have been violently
extended…through new technologies like iris-scan biometrics devices and
data-base management…many new twenty-first century technologies, like
big data mining and computational social network analysis, are rooted in
colonial practices.” (The Afterlives of Counterinsurgency:
Postcolonialism, Military Social Science, and Afghanistan 2006-2012 by
Oliver Christian Belcher)